Date:

Thursday, November 6, 2014, 9:00am

Location:

Naito Laboratory, Room 205, 12 Oxford Street

Abstract: The central ambition of theoretical chemistry is to describe chemistry in its diversity solely as a solution to Schrodinger Equation. The difficulty of this strategy is that it has to capture development of molecular systems at multiple spatiotemporal scales which is prohibitively

expensive. Prebiological chemistry is the most challenging in this sense because the target phenomenon - the emergence of life - cannot be meaningfully represented as a collection of independent events at the level of organic reactions, polymer self-assembly and formation of cell-like structures. In my talk, I will describe one possible approach to the reconstruction of prebiological chemistry that relies on the strategies adopted in design of molecular materials. This approach combines quantum chemistry, symbolic chemistry, and graph theory in order to screen the space of prebiological reactions and construct “Prebiotic Atlas”.

Dmitry Zubarev, is a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aspuru-Guzik Group within the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology